Vancouver’s efforts to transform “Canada’s poorest postal code” into a neighbourhood where rich and poor coexist have led to protests outside upscale businesses.

Anti-gentrification activists picketing outside Pidgin, a new upscale restaurant in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, say they are protesting out of "peace and love" for the low-income residents of the long-troubled neighbourhood.

Outside a softly lit restaurant serving beef tartare and $12 cocktails, a ragged group of protesters hovers by the entrance. “Feed the hungry. Eat the rich,” taunts one cardboard sign.

The restaurant is Pidgin, a new casual-upscale eatery in Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside — and the horde of angry protesters has been there almost every night since it opened in February.

The city has seen an outbreak of anti-gentrification activism in recent months, and tensions reached a boiling point last week when an anonymous group called the Anti-Gentrification Front torched a single-family home under construction.

The group has also claimed responsibility for repeatedly smashing the windows of an East Vancouver pizzeria. On International Worker’s Day, a masked mob carrying lit torches marched past Pidgin with a banner that read “Set Fire to the Condos.”

Despite the eruption of protest, Vancouver city planners remain devoted to a development strategy known as “social mix.” The theory, which also underpins the redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park, is that adding market housing and upscale businesses helps to lift low-income areas out of poverty.

So in the neighbourhood often called “Canada’s poorest postal code” — long ravaged by disease, addiction and death — one can now buy $3 doughnuts outside a social housing complex or rent a luxury condo just blocks from a safe-injection site.

Pidgin is not the first chic restaurant in the area, but its name and location have turned it into a flash point. It sits across the street from Pigeon Park, a paved square frequented by the homeless and addicted.

Wendy Pedersen, a well-known community organizer who has lived in the Downtown Eastside for two decades, said the Pidgin protest is meant to be peaceful. “People think we’re violent anarchists and we’re not. We’re motivated by love and care for the people in the neighbourhood.”

Vancouver police say there are no established links between the protest and the house fire or the smashed windows at the pizzeria. No arrests have been made, apart from one 25-year-old woman being charged with mischief after she allegedly tried to chain the doors at Pidgin shut with staff inside.

Spokesman Brian Montague said police are familiar with some members of the Anti-Gentrification Front but it is difficult to identify those who anonymously claim responsibility online.

For Pedersen and the six to 12 activists who gather nightly outside the restaurant, the goal is to stop customers from entering. She acknowledged that some protesters yell at “yuppie” patrons not to enter or block the doors.

“Lives are at stake,” she said. “We want to send a signal that until we get the 5,000 social housing units to replace the sh-tty hotels the neighbourhood is not for sale.”

The “hotels” she refers to are single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels: derelict heritage buildings that house the city’s poorest residents. The province has bought 26 of the buildings — some 1,500 rooms — to be maintained as social housing.

The remaining 5,000 rooms in SROs in the Downtown Eastside are run privately and are notoriously filthy, dangerous and decrepit.

Pedersen and her former colleagues at the Carnegie Community Action Project, a vocal neighbourhood group, want the province to buy all the buildings and turn them entirely into social housing.

But the city, led by centre-left coalition Vision Vancouver, has different plans. Councillor Kerry Jang said that to create buildings that are 100-per-cent social housing would only further ghettoize the neighbourhood.

“If you look at any public health data, all the studies show that mixed neighbourhoods work best,” Jang said. “If you have exclusive neighbourhoods for the poor — and I think Vancouver made that mistake in the Downtown Eastside — you wind up creating a ghetto.”

The Downtown Eastside was once the heart of the city. It had a diverse population and a busy shopping district. But the neighbourhood began to decline in the 1970s and eventually became the local skid row, known for sex workers, drug addicts and the mentally ill.

The city began its “social mix” strategy in the early 2000s, led by late councillor and Downtown Eastside advocate Jim Green. All new developments in the city must now be at least one-fifth low-income housing, defined as renting at 20 per cent cheaper than the market rate.

The mixed-use Woodward’s redevelopment is the city’s shining example. Once an abandoned building filled with squatters, it reopened in 2009 with 526 market housing units, 200 low-income units, businesses and an open atrium often home to public art installations.

The city has long maintained that its approach is “revitalization without displacement,” but Pedersen and the CCAP claim that poor people are being pushed out by rent increases at the privately owned SROs.

However, the number of social housing units has more than doubled since 1993 from 3,604 to 7,642. According to Jang, this indicates the protesters’ agenda is not about displacement: it’s about social mix.

“They want it to remain a neighbourhood of only poor people,” he said.

Nathan Edelson, a former city planner who worked on the Downtown Eastside strategy now underway, said the neighbourhoods that people like best are often ones with mixed incomes, like Toronto’s Parkdale.

“Can people live together? Absolutely,” Edelson said. “In fact, people often take pride in the fact that they live in diverse places, where their kids aren’t growing up next door to people just like them.”

Local restaurateur Mark Brand agrees. In 2011 he renovated and reopened Save On Meats, a beloved Gastown butcher shop, and later added a diner next door. The transformation was detailed in the reality show Gastown Gamble, which some community residents found patronizing.

The only solution is more dialogue, he said. “I hope people continue to talk, and I hope that they continue to do it intelligently, so that the people who do wield the power and will develop will want to work with them instead of dismissing them.”

The building where Pidgin was built had sat empty for decades. The restaurant, like Save On Meats, employs local residents and donates to neighbourhood charities.

Jean Swanson, co-ordinator of the CCAP, dismissed these efforts as condescending. “Charity isn’t going to solve the problem. We need higher welfare rates. We need housing people can afford.”

She believes social mix is a “patronizing, poor-bashing theory.”

“Say you’re a low-income person with a mental illness and a luxury condo gets built next door. How is that going to help you? All it does is raise the property values.”

Meanwhile, Pidgin owner Brandon Grossutti doesn’t regret his choice of location, even after four months of arguing with screaming protesters on his doorstep until he’s “exhausted.”

The former computer programmer chose to open his first restaurant in the Downtown Eastside because he has a personal connection to the area: members of his family have struggled with addiction.

He isn’t sure how the protesters have affected business, since they’ve always been there. While some customers likely stay home to avoid being harassed, others visit the restaurant just to support him.

Grossutti pointed out that many of the protesters are not actually local residents. “If a majority of the residents opposed it, maybe I’d have second thoughts,” he said.

“I don’t think that having 20 Pidgin restaurants is what the neighbourhood needs either. But I do think that bringing economic traffic and stimulus to the Downtown Eastside is only going to serve it for the better.”

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